Border Wars: The Radical Ethnography of John T. Caldwell
Sat 10/26/2024 • 7:30PM - 9:40PM PDT
Billy Wilder Theater
Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television
In-person:
filmmaker and UCLA Distinguished Research Professor John T. Caldwell; community filmmaker Devora Gomez; UCLA Associate Professor Jasmine Nadua Trice.
As a media artist and a scholar, John Thornton Caldwell has built a distinguished career around exploring communities of labor in crisis and flux. A Distinguished Research Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA, Caldwell has helped pioneer the field of production studies in works that examine how below-the-line film and television workers in Hollywood have adapted to globalization and technological change, including Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Duke University Press, 2008) and Specworld: Folds, Faults, and Fractures in Embedded Creator Industries (UC Press, 2023). In his work as a filmmaker, Caldwell relies on fieldwork and ethnographic research to document the exploitation and resistance of migrant farmworkers and rural labor communities in central and southern California. Each practice informs the other in Caldwell’s larger project of making visible what our cultural politics and economic policies work to normalize or keep hidden altogether in what he has described as America’s “new suburban plantation culture.” This timely program brings together a selection of Caldwell’s experimental documentaries and agitprop videos that trace the history and persistence of migrant worker exploitation and labor organizing in rural California as well as the deep and tangled roots of the white grievance feeding the populist rhetoric of the current election cycle. The Archive is thrilled to present these works with Caldwell in person and in conversation with community filmmaker Devora Gomez and Jasmine Nadua Trice, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA.
In conjunction with this in-person screening at the Billy Wilder Theater, the Archive will host two additional immigration-focused documentaries available to view for free on the Archive’s Vimeo page: Amor Vegetal: Our Harvest (Devora Gomez, John T. Caldwell, 1996) and Freak Street to Goa: The Migratory Patterns of Hippies on the Subcontinent (John T. Caldwell, John L. Pudaite, 1989).